


pros and cons of living in a small town

by exactlyemma



Category: Firebringer - Team StarKid
Genre: F/F, background emberly/grant, past jemilla/clark, tw-referenced/implied child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:21:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26805046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exactlyemma/pseuds/exactlyemma
Summary: Jemilla might have grown up beside Zazzalil, but she has never felt close to her. In fact, she's always kind of hated her. So, when circumstance keeps pushing them together, Jemilla is less than reluctant. But the farther Jemilla gets from high school, the more she learns about Zazz, and the more she realizes that she may have misjudged her. Maybe, just maybe, the seemingly perfect Jemilla has finally made a mistake.
Relationships: Jemilla/Zazzalil (Firebringer)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	pros and cons of living in a small town

**Author's Note:**

> this is something i wrote a little while ago and i wanted to post something so. here we are.

Growing up in a small town was a unique experience to say the least. Jemilla had the strange sensation of knowing everyone, and the stranger sensation of everyone knowing her. If kids were caught shoplifting there was no chase scene, the employee could simply threaten to call the parents and it was over. 

Growing up in the small and tightly knit community that was her parents outdoor theater was a more unique experience, if it was possible. In seventh grade when some folks from out of town came for her English class’s playwriting unit, they asked if anyone had seen a musical. Jemilla, along with around half the room raised their hands, the folks asked a few of them what musical they’d seen and what they thought of it. Then they asked if anyone had ever seen a play. Jemilla’s hand was halfway up when she realized not a single other person had their hand raised. She dropped it. 

One of the downsides of small town life was her school was tiny. Later, when she went to college, her classmates would be astounded to hear that her graduating high school class was only thirty people, and that was a big class, but as a kid it just meant that she knew more about everyone than she would rather have known. For example, when Grant’s parents got a divorce, the whole school knew within a week. The upside to all that was that for the most part, nobody in the town was an asshole, and people were supportive when news spread. People were careful around Grant when they asked about their plans for the weekend, knowing Grant might be moving between households, nobody questioned when he said something like “I can’t, I’m with my dad,” when couldn’t he just ask his dad? But they weren’t assholes for the most part, so they left well enough alone.

Emphasis on most of them. Because most of them didn’t push the invisible boundaries. In fact, only one person did. Her name was Zazzalil. 

Jemilla, who was a generally reserved person who always made time for everyone, could never handle Zazzalil. Zazzalil and her million questions, whose ‘why’ phase had never ended, her _eyes_ , and her pushy nature. She was always the one to point out that if Grant’s father was never home anyway why did Grant have to be? She was also the one to be shushed and told to be ‘more considerate’. She somehow managed to stay mostly out of trouble. The situations only rarely got out of hand, at which point Zazzalil would grab the arm of the person she had offended and leave the room. She sometimes didn’t return, but the offended always did, reassuring everyone that it was alright and she meant no harm. 

Jemilla was pretty sure she threatened them with something. Why else would they forgive so quickly? Especially forgive Zazzalil of all people? When all she had ever done was dig past her place, always pushing the buttons and pushing boundaries that didn’t need to be pushed. 

Entirely too much of Jemilla’s high school life was spent avoiding Zazzalil and trying to figure out why she couldn’t just quiet down. Jemilla’s job was made harder when Zazzalil got a job at her parent’s theater, a counselor at the summer camp, when Jemilla’s summer was so often spent figuring out where Zazzalil was going to be and pointedly not going there. Now she couldn’t avoid her, when her dad made her come to work with him because she’d been lying around the house all week and he needed to get a bunch of paperwork done. How was Jemilla supposed to avoid seeing Zazzalil when she was all over the building; in the kitchen heating up a kid’s lunch, in the staffroom hiding from a particularly clingy child, or physically in the theater for the kids rehearsals? She was everywhere, and Jemilla couldn’t escape her.

It was the summer after they had graduated high school, and they had both returned from their respective colleges and come home for the summer. Jemilla was working a part time job at the theater and so, it seemed, was Zazzalil.

It was on one of these occasions that Jemilla got her first insight into the mind of Zazzalil. She was in one of the dressing rooms, somewhere campers weren’t supposed to be with a crying little boy, and Jemilla was about to start telling her off when she overheard the conversation.

“What’s wrong?” Zazzalil asked, setting the boy down on the counter in front of the mirrors. The boy sniffled, wiping tears out of his eyes. Typical Zazzalil. Putting her nose in other people’s business. “I can’t help if you don’t talk to me,” she said, putting a gentle hand on the boy’s knee.

Help? No, she just wanted to have more blackmail dirt.

“I don’t want camp to end,” the little boy confessed, fresh tears spilling over his face. “I finally have friends, I don’t want to lose them.”

Zazzalil shushed him, rubbing his back with one hand. “Hey, it’s alright, Tim, I promise.”

“But I’m never going to see them again!” The little boy protested.

“Who told you that?” She asked, her voice soft.

Tim sniffled. “My sister.”

“Well, you might want to be more careful about what you believe from your sister. Who are your friends?”

“Micah and Sammy,” he said, his voice shaky.

Zazzalil laughed, but in a somehow kind and not degrading way. “Well Tim, I happen to know that both Micah and Sammy live in this town and have no plans of moving. They’re even your age, you guys are probably in the same grade.”

Tim brightened. “Really?”

“Yes really! You can even ask them to make sure. And I’m sure they’ll want to hang out over the summer with you, I can get your parents to exchange phone numbers if you want.”

His eyes widened. “You’d do that?”

“Of course.” Zazzalil smiled and put Tim back on the ground. “It is my job as camp counselor to make sure my campers are having a good time, isn’t it?”

Tim slid his hand into Zazzalil’s, cracking a smile. “Thank you.”

She smiled and ruffled his hair. “Anytime.”

Jemilla backed into the dressing room across the hall as they passed, her mind racing. What had she just witnessed?

Further confusion occurred when she was late to work on one of the last days of camp, rushing in with her camp shirt on and her hair out of it’s usual ponytail. Jemilla sat by the desk, checking in campers.

“You’re late,” she stated as Zazzalil rushed past.

Zazzalil winced, looking upset to be caught as if she wasn’t walking straight past Jemilla. “I’m so sorry, I was with Grant and I lost track of time-”

“-Grant is with his father right now,” Jemilla said, frowning. She only knew this due to the schedule that the whole school had practically memorized while Grant was still struggling about the divorce. “He doesn’t have company over at his father’s.”

Zazzalil sighed. “He asked me to come over, alright? I told him I’d help if he needed it and he needed it. Now I’m sorry that I’m five minutes late for work, can I go now before I’m more late?”

“Fine, but I’m marking you down as late.”

“Oh no, you’re doing your job.” Zazzalil’s face hardened as she went, dissolving back into a smile as the first camper caught sight of her. Jemilla made the note, the frown refusing to leave her face. Grant had asked her to come over? When he made it a point to tell everyone that he wasn’t allowed friends over at his father’s? Maybe he was cheating on Emberly with Zazzalil.

Jemilla didn’t think much of the incident afterwards, and was beginning to think she’d heard the last of the girl she’d spent so much of her childhood worrying about when she heard mention of a ‘Zazz’ from a friend of a friend.

“Who?” Jemilla demanded, looking up from her paper.

TIblyn blinked. “Um, Zazzalil?”

Jemilla sighed and shook her head, making a note on the draft of her essay.

“She’s a really good friend,” Tiblyn said, typing in her laptop. “She figured out I was having a hard time in ‘intro to engineering’ and she offered to help. Don’t think I would have passed without her.”

“Surprised she was actually good at something,” Jemilla muttered, turning the page of her paper.

“What?” Tiblyn frowned.

“Oh, Jemilla’s got some silly grudge against Zazz since high school,” Emberly said dismissively, waving a hand. 

“It is not silly!” Jemilla protested.

“She’s a bit obsessed,” Emberly stage-whispered to Tiblyn, who laughed.

Jemilla rolled her eyes. “She was a nuisance to everyone, I’m just the only one who could admit it.”

Emberly sighed. “J, you’re still upset about Grant? That was high school.”

“It was high school, and Zazzalil was old enough to know not to push his boundaries! We all knew to be careful around Grant, she just disregarded all of that.”

“Jemilla, Grant had very little freedom when he was with his father as a minor. I wasn’t allowed over, because god forbid his girlfriend have the chance to be alone with him, but Zazzalil kissed up to his ass for a few weeks and told him she was gay.” Emberly took a sip of her coffee. “Grant’s father is many bad things, and homophobic isn’t one of them. Zazz was at his house all the time.”

“Wasn’t that disruptive?” Jemilla asked, a final stab in a losing fight.

“Maybe, but when there were guests around Grant’s father didn’t hurt him.” Emberly sighed. “Zazzalil got him through high school. She even slept over at his house if he really needed the support.”

Jemilla put her pen down. “I didn’t know that.”

Emberly scoffed, highlighting a passage of her book. “Believe me, I know.”

“She really did all that?”

Emberly nodded. “Since high school. I don’t know what you thought they talked about when they left the cafeteria.”

Jemilla picked her pen back up and continued editing her paper, but her mind was on Zazzalil. If she had done all that for Grant, who was to say that she wasn’t a horrible monster to everyone? And to think Jemilla called herself a good judge of character.

Whatever Jemilla thought of Zazzalil anymore--because even she wasn’t sure--one of the last things she expected was to be Zazzaliled herself.

It was stupid. But Jemilla had just been broken up with, and anyone who had ever been broken up with could tell you that nine point five out of ten times, it wasn’t fun. She was sitting in one of the seats of the vacant outdoor theater. The camp rehearsal had ended awhile ago, and the adult’s rehearsal didn’t start until the evening, when it hopefully got a little cooler. The sun wouldn’t be beating down on the poor people’s heads, for one thing. Wherever everyone was, an empty theater was a rather satisfying place to cry. When it was actually vacant, that was. 

Jemilla couldn’t be sure why Zazzalil was there in the first place. She could have been sent to clean up after the kid’s snack, or to retrieve a child’s lunchbox. There was a long list of possible reasons, and none of them included ‘soothing Jemilla’.

When she felt the hand on her shoulder, at first she assumed it was one of her parents. Then the hand spoke, and it was suddenly attached to a body that was most definitely not either of her parents.

“Jemilla?”

She looked up from her phone screen with the lame breakup text, pushing the hair away from her face. Of course she would be here now.

“Zazzalil?”

The young woman fidgeted in the aisle, biting her lower lip. “Um, I know you kinda hate me, so I can leave if you want, it’s just… you’re crying and my instinct when I see someone crying isn’t to run away-”

“-I don’t hate you,” Jemilla offered, her voice shakier than she would have liked. 

Zazzalil tilted her head. She didn’t look convinced. “You don’t?”

Jemilla shook her head.

“So high school was what, a game?”

Jemilla swallowed. “High school is in the past. I don’t know what we had then, but I’d like for it to be over now, if that’s alright with you.”

Zazzalil’s nervous features dissolved into a small smile, and her foot stopped bouncing on the step. “So… you alright?”

Jemilla shrugged. Hesitantly, she showed Zazzalil her phone screen. Zazzalil read the messages in silence, her eyebrows furrowing as she read. After she finished, she sat down next to Jemilla, watching the empty stage for a few minutes.

“So fuck Clark?”

Jemilla laughed for the first time all day. “Not anymore.”

Zazzalil groaned. “Bad joke.”

“I thought it was funny.”

“Of course you did.”

They sat in silence awhile. Zazzalil’s legs were short enough that she could kick them back and forth. Jemilla started bouncing her knee, and Zazzalil put a hand down on it. She didn’t expect to actually feel soothed by the action.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Jemilla did want to talk about it, she decided. And so she did. And Zazzalil listened. The girl shut her mouth for once. It turned out talking about it felt really good. And it suddenly didn’t seem like the worst thing to say hi whenever she saw Zazzalil in the hallway, or offer her a bandaid the next time she walked into the office with a crying kid clutching their bloody elbow. The smile Zazzalil offered in return for the bandaid only made the deed all the more worth it. 

Jemilla was awkwardly hanging around the end-of-the-season party, plate with a slice of pizza and plastic cup of watered down lemonade in hand. She was sitting cross legged on a bench beneath the gondola outside the theater where guests would mingle before the shows and during intermission, the pavilion surrounded by the gift shop, snack stand, and bathrooms. 

“Did your parents make you come?”

Jemilla looked up from her plate to find Zazzalil in front of her, taking a sip of her own lemonade cup. “How’d you know?”

She shrugged. “I’m intuitive like that. Want a partner?”

It took Jemilla entirely too long to understand. She scooted over to make room on the bench. “Oh, sure.”

Zazzalil smiled and sat down. “It’s been nice getting to know this new Jemilla who doesn’t hate me.”

Jemilla smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.”

“No, no. It’s a welcome change.”

Jemilla put her feet down into her sandals. “No, I mean I’m sorry for how I acted in high school. It was stupid and petty.”

“Oh.” Zazzalil blinked. “Thank you.”

Jemilla only nodded, her eyes on her pizza. She didn’t have the courage to look anywhere else.

“What changed?” Zazzalil asked, looking genuinely puzzled.

Jemilla’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Huh?”

“What changed?” Zazzalil repeated. “You don’t hate me anymore. Why?”

Jemilla swallowed. This question had deeper connotations than she had been prepared for. “There was definitely some pure grudge for stupid stuff when we were little.”

Zazzalil laughed. “Like what?”

“I think you budged in front of me for the slide once at the playground. In preschool."

She smiled, and Jemilla suddenly wanted to tell every story she had in her rather small repertoire. “And then there was stuff like Grant, where I didn’t have the whole story and I made an unfair judgement.”

She arched an eyebrow. “What did you think about Grant?”

Jemilla shook her head. “I just thought you were nosy and rude. It was unfair of me, and I’m sorry.”

Zazzalil shrugged. “That was old you. I like new Jemilla.”

Jemilla smiled. She liked her new self too. New Jemilla was Zazzalil’s friend, and that version of Jemilla was somehow automatically better.

Another perk/downside of living in a small town was every single citizen having a connection to the person who had died most recently. For the most part, the population of the town weren’t assholes, and they dressed up nicely and gave nice speeches at the funeral. When Jemilla got the call, she just wasn’t expecting the deceased to be Zazzalil’s father.

Jemilla could remember when Zazzalil’s mother died. She had been young. Too young. That was what everyone said in the privacy of their own homes. Annabel, to have a daughter, Zazzalil to lose a mother. 

“She doesn’t deserve any of this,” Jemilla said, her hands on the steering wheel.

“I mean, I’m not disagreeing with you, but that is a very different account of Zazzalil than I heard last time,” Emberly said, digging through a bag in her lap. She was sitting in the passenger's seat of Jemilla’s old car as they drove from school back home for the funeral. “What happened?”

“What? Nothing.” 

Emberly raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Sounds like denial, but okay.”

Jemilla scoffed. “Denial? Of what?”

She sighed dramatically and spread her hands. “Love.”

“Ew.” Jemilla hit Emberly’s arm. “You just want me to get a girlfriend, don’t get your hopes up.”

“Guilty.” Emberly stretched out in her seat, earning herself another spared glare from Jemilla. “Now I’m imagining it, though, J, you’d make a cute couple, just sayin’.”

Jemilla rolled her eyes and dismissed the thought. Dutifully ignored the small part of her that was pleased about the statement. That was ridiculous. Even if there was a small chance Jemilla had a tiny crush on Zazzalil, it wasn’t as if she would ever reciprocate.

Jemilla began her when possible, not sure what to make of how she felt around Zazzalil. She wasn’t sure what it meant that she took the time to notice Zazzalil’s outfit, or how it fit, or linger in a hug, why her lips were so mesmerizing. The way that when Zazzalil smiled at Jemilla, and she felt a something in her stomach. A something that made her want to kiss Zazzalil.

“Emberly, small problem.”

“What?”

“Zazzalil.”

Jemilla could already hear the stupid satisfaction in Emberly’s voice. “What about her?”

She grit her teeth. “You know what.”

Emberly beamed. “I have her number-”

“- _Not_ what I meant.”

Emberly only smirked.

…

“I’ll take her number.”

Jemilla would never forgive her parents. How was she supposed to avoid her secret crush when said crush was assigned to go through the old costumes with her? The costumes vault was big and dusty, rows of dresses and suits and hoop skirts lining the walls, along with boxes upon boxes of hats, shoes, and other accessories. It was a strange mixture of peaceful and incredibly overwhelming.

“Do you hate me again?” Zazzalil asked half an hour into the dreaded task.

Jemilla bit her lip, not having the courage to look at Zazzalil. She was too pretty. “I don’t hate you.”

Zazzalil heaved a box down from a high shelf, blowing dust off the lid. “That’s what you said last time.”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Jemilla said, leaning into the container of hats she was going through to hide her face.

Zazzalil grabbed her arm, spinning Jemilla to face her. “Try me.”

Jemilla could feel the warm exhale of breath on her chest. The catch in her own breath didn’t escape Zazzalil, who looked from Jemilla’s eyes to her lips.

Jemilla swallowed. “That might have something to do with it.”

Zazzalil pushed onto her tiptoes, putting one hand on Jemilla’s shoulder and kissing her square on the lips. She parted with Jemilla enough that they could make eye contact. Zazzalil raised questioning eyebrows. Jemilla pulled Zazzalil back into the kiss, putting one hand around her waist. She could feel Zazzalil’s lips turning up. And _god_ it felt so good.

“Never thought I’d be one of the girls making out in the costume vault,” Zazzalil said breathlessly once they had parted again.

Jemilla smirked, setting a hat so old it was disintegrating in her hand into the ‘discard’ pile. “Have you not made out in here before?”

Zazzalil scoffed, holding out a dress on the rack. “No. Have you?”

“Hasn’t everyone?”

Zazzalil dropped the dress. “No! Ew! Jemilla!”

“What? I got around.”

Zazzalil covered her eyes. “I’m not coming out until you stop being gross.”

Jemilla held Zazzalil by her elbows and kissed her forehead.

“That counts,” Zazzalil muttered, putting her arms around Jemilla and pulling her back down.

Zazzalil was one perk of Jemillla’s particular small town, but an overall benefit was that she didn’t have to tell anyone they were dating, because the minute they were seen outside holding hands, the whole town knew.

Keeping the engagement ring hidden until Zazzalil said yes was quite possibly the biggest secret the population as a whole had ever kept. Jemilla was not ungrateful. Neither was Zazzalil, although she was mostly impressed. As a reward, the couple planned a slightly bigger wedding reception than originally planned, although the cost wasn’t as much as it should have been since the owner of the venue was a guest and gave them a discount, as did the caterer. 

That day was quite possibly the best of Jemilla’s life, right in front of graduating college and kissing Zazz for the first time. The best part, however, was when they came home after the wedding. Not the night, although Jemilla had no complaints on that either. It was the evening, when they sat on their rocking chairs on the porch, Zazzalil rocking back and forth quickly because she couldn’t sit still for shit, Jemilla rocking gently as one could. Still dressed in wedding attire. They sat as they did every night, but it was somehow better now. Because they weren’t acquaintances anymore. They weren’t borderline enemies. They weren’t friends. They weren’t girlfriends. They weren’t fiancees. They were wives. 

Jemilla could get used to that.

**Author's Note:**

> "so fuck clark?" "not anymore" is the funniest thing i've written in a long time and it's not even that funny i just love it.


End file.
